Chipped Paint
by All The Good Names Taken
Summary: There's a little blue box sitting in the park. It's been there for over fifty years. No one knows where it came from, why it's there, or if it even is there. But when someone needs a place to hide, it shows to be just the right thing. Challenge fic.


**An entry for Dragongirl of the Stars' challenge; _What do you think will happen? _**

**Chipped Paint**

There wasn't anything particularly special about it. It was just something that had always been there. Always sitting quietly, patiently, on the corner of the street. No one ever noticed it, and if they did, they would merely stand and stare, sometimes touching as if they were reassuring themselves it was real. It could be seen from many windows of the estate, standing in the next-door park, behind a black metal fence; striking and invisible at the same time.

The paint was chipped, revealing grey wood beneath. The once royal blue, dull and shaded. There was graffiti, albeit small and almost unnoticeable if you weren't looking for it, but it only encouraged its ruse. Helped the fiction mould itself into the life of Earth. Helped it become _real_. It had been many years since anyone had truly looked at it. Truly _saw _it.

It was nothing. A delusion of grandeur. A myth.

As she ran, the streetlamp flickered. The golden light hit the asphalt, streaking a metallic blaze across the black. She gasped as she stumbled a bit, but she couldn't stop. She should've known walking this late was dangerous. But it was such a clear night...

She turned a corner, entering the courtyard of the park. She cast her eyes around, desperately searching for a hiding place. The dustbins would be too obvious, and all entrances to the buildings around her would be locked so late. She ran a hand through her dark hair, cursing in a breath. She could hear his footsteps behind her.

Then she spotted it. Chances are it was locked, but it was her last chance. Risking a look behind her, she bolted towards the object. A great, big, blue box. Faded and silent, but calling out to her in a way she couldn't describe. "POLICE BOX" was written in dirty white letters, and a broken light sat atop. Everything about it _screamed _"lost", and she was willing to become so.

Thrusting the doors open, which creaked loudly to the silence in protest, she shut her eyes and slammed them shut behind her. She felt a lock, and turned it. She grinned in relief as it clicked in place, breathing heavily to the emptiness. She couldn't hear anything through the old wood, but a dim yellow light streamed through from the streetlamp outside.

Sighing loudly, she turned around. Her breath was robbed and she stood frozen. It was huge. A great, dome-like room, with a large tube sitting on a vast circular base. What looked like stems of coral stretched from the grated floor to the roof, curving and strange. The walls were covered in lights, but nearly all were shattered. Some remnants of them glittered on the floor. Wires hung from the roof, limp and unmoving. She fumbled with the door, trying to push it open, but remembered it was locked.

Before she could turn it once more to open, a large bang came from the other side. Someone was trying to get it. She clamped her fingers down on the lock, holding it in place. The drunken swearing of her follower was muffled, and after a few more moments, he left, leaving her alone again.

Sighing once more, she turned around and tried to make sense of this bizarre place. Outside, the box stood away from the wall, you could walk a full circle around it. There was no way it was a fancy entry for a building. Besides, there was no place on Earth that looked like this. Nowhere that she saw anyway.

Walking slowly up a grated ramp, towards the great tube and base, she felt her heart-beat quicken. She wanted to run away. Every cell in her body was screaming out, fighting against the place. But she pressed on, overcome with an emotion she couldn't identify. Her footsteps echoed, their sound feeling almost unwelcome in the quiet.

A force rebelling against her disturbance.

She reached the tube and grazed her hand over its base. Her fingers slipped over the strange buttons and leavers that jutted out from it. This was strange. Odd. Bizarre. _Alien. _

She cast her gaze around yet again, soaking in every detail. The place was beautiful and terrifying, like most glorious things and she wanted to remember everything about it. Cold blue shadows, twisting and warping themselves across the ceiling and walls. The dusty glass of the tube, the forgotten buttons with worn out numbers on them from a life-time of being pressed.

Overwhelmed once more by a strange emotion, she reached forward and grazed her hand across the tube's glass, leaving three straight lines were her fingers stroked. Suddenly, a voice ripped through the silence. It was quiet, but everything else was so subdued it sounded too loud. She gasped and jumped away as two words echoed;

"_I'm sorry..." _

She turned on the spot to find the voice's origin, but it faded to nothing as quickly as it came. The voice terrified her, as it sounded like one, but reverberated like it was about a dozen men, all speaking at once. A cold chill encased her and she soon felt the familiar feeling of being unwelcome.

She backed down the ramp slowly, drinking in the strange sight of the place she had discovered. Reaching back, she sought the lock and snapped it to open. Turning around, almost regretfully, she left the box and closed the door behind her, its creak replaying in her mind long after it was closed.

She circled the box, just to be sure. It was definitely separate, but she couldn't bring herself to enter again. It wasn't a bitterness that radiated from the blue box, more a _wrongness. _Like it was the wrong place, the wrong time...

The wrong person.

She gripped her shoulders in an attempt to comfort herself, but she couldn't drag her mind from the coldness of the box's contents. She started to walk around it, planning on just walking home as fast as possible. But something caught her eye. A flash of white against the blue. She turned to face the box once more.

It was a on the left side, a small bit of graffiti written, as if in a hurry. Two sketchy white words.

_Mal Loup._

Her brow furrowed in confusion. Was it a different language? Or some new slang words? She read over the two words, grazing her fingers across the chipped paint. She shivered in a sudden cold. She felt as though someone, _(something?), _was watching her. She withdrew her hand and tucked next to her side. She looked at the words again. _French maybe, or German?_ She didn't find the language as interesting as the words however.

She could feel eternity in the words. And she could feel nothing. Something about the words felt... absolute. Final. _Tragic? _

She sighed in defeat and rose. Turning away from the blue box and its forgotten nature, she continued home, sleeping soundly for the rest of the night. She met a man the next day, which she soon became friendly with. They got engaged a few years later, and she lives in Bristol with him and her two children.

This was all thirty-four years ago. In 1975.

All that time, the blue box remained. Just as it had for twenty-years before her intrusion. In 1953, there were two blue boxes. One was housing a couple, the other an old man. He had taken his magnificent blue box to nearly every time and every place, just to spend five minutes watching a younger, happier version of him. Each time, that version was with someone else. Companions. Some were clever, some were not. Some were brilliant, some fantastic. It didn't matter to the old man. On his last trip, to 1953, he remained. And started to fade away with his grand blue box. But wood lasts much longer than skin.

And soon the man was forgotten, and his blue box left to wither and die in a world it always considered home. Even if the ghost of its birthplace hung over it like a cloud.

A red-haired woman is walking through the park. She's on her way to visit her friend who's very hung-over after a great night out with the red-haired woman and some other friends. The woman smiles at the memory and quickens her pace, her heels clacking against the footpath.

Her phone rings shrilly and she scrambles with her hand-bag to retrieve it. Once she has it in her hand, she answers it hurriedly. Her voice softens as she recognises the voice and she grins to no one.

"Hey, Granddad. No, I'm just on my way to Claire's-"

She passes the blue box in her quick pace, but she stops as a feeling of familiarity overcomes her, drawing her towards the strange article. She looks at it for a long time and feels as if something is calling out to her. As if it... _knows _her.

The word "brilliant" comes to mind and she soon finds herself day-dreaming. A shiver runs down her spine as she looks away.

She blames it on the wind.


End file.
